To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

From Technicians of the Sacred Expanded (a work in progress): “The Khanty Prayer of the Bear” by Leonty Taragupta, poem & commentary

O Father of the Seven Skies –

I too have been a God-spirit,

descendant of the bright
ancestor,

descendant of the all-hearing
ancestor,

though set upon the firmament

of the Earth!

But the Son of the Master of
Towns –

is he your Father’s heir?

the son of the Master of the
Hamlets –

is he your Mother’s heir?

O Father of the Seven Skies?

Please send down

ten mighty animals

from the abundant celestial
pastures!

And ten mighty animals

did descend.

I hear the Son of the Master
of Towns

went into the woods.

Like the crack of the briar
nut

on strong teeth

he slew the celestial
messengers.

Like the crack of the cherry
nut

on strong teeth

he slew the celestial
messengers.

And into his sable nest

onto his downy seat

he fell like a
broad-shouldered pine.

I too have been a God-spirit.

O Mother, hear me!

O Father, hear me!

Please send down

twenty mighty animals from

the abundant celestial
pastures.

As soon as

twenty mighty animals

were set upon the firmament

of the Earth

the piercing cries

of the forest giants

rose again

in the woods near the house.

But they died out again

with a crack of the cherry nut

on the strong teeth

of the Son of the Towns.

They died out again

with a crack of the briar nut

on the strong teeth

of the Son of the Hamlets.

I hear

he fell again

into his sable nest

onto his downy seat

like a broad-shouldered pine
tree.

O Father of the Seven Skies,

my forefather, hear me!

O Mother of the Seven Skies,

my foremother, hear me!

The Son of the Master of Towns
–

is he your Father’s heir?

The Son of the Master of
Hamlets –

is he your Mother’s heir?

Please send down

the leader of the hundred
animals,

my mother the White-Neck!

In the woods by the house

the piercing cries

of the forest giants

rise again.

The Son of the Master of Towns

goes into the woods.

The crack of the cherry nut

on strong teeth

is all I hear.

The crack of the briar nut

on strong teeth

is all I hear.

Yet by the White-necked Deer

by my White-Necked Mother

by the eight-layered bow

he is brought to the ground.

O Son of the Master of Towns,

O Son of the Master of
Hamlets,

you have slaughtered

my offspring,

the mighty animals,

with the crack of a briar nut

on strong teeth –

with the crack of a cherry nut

on strong teeth.

But the sacred clan-mother,

the great White-Neck

you cannot destroy!

Now,

since you have overthrown

at daybreak

that poor son of mine

sent from the skies,

you shall spread the

sacred happy news of him

to the towns and the hamlets,

including your own sinful
town.

You shall raise

a sacred house

higher than the highest

beautiful houses.

You shall make

a broad flooring of three planks

in the western corner.

You shall encircle

this bright home

with sacred smoke.

You shall humbly rest

the head of the good son

on that fresh flooring

with a bowl of hot food
behind.

Only when this is done

at the man-dance

may the children of the three tribes

come together.

Only when this is done

may you hear

the five songs of the taiga

from five open-hearted sons.

And only after this

may you call for the

hump-backed

merry pranksters.

And in the future

when the lovely woman-faced
happy world

shall come to pass,

when the hunting tracks

of the blood-children

shall blaze without fear –

children of the eternal tree,

dwellers of the Lower World,

children of the severed navel
cord –

you shall remember

my testament.

(Khanty,Siberia)

commentary

Source : Translation from Khanty & Russian
by Alexander Vaschenko & Claude Clayton Smith, in The Way of Kinship, An Anthology of Native Siberian Literature
(University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 213-217. (1) What continues
into the present is the Khanty Bear Feast, still practiced on native grounds
while entering into a new poetry that
keeps alive the old images &
powers. OfTaragupta’sconnection
to this his translators write: “Born in 1945 in the village of Poslovy in the
Yama-Nenets autonomous region ... Taragupta devotes his time to restoring the
ancient Khanty Bear Feast epic and native philosophy as well as restoring the
art of making native musical instruments. ... In ‘The Prayer of the Bear” the
son of the master of towns and hamlets is the ancient Khanty hunter who kills
the Bear. The Son of the Sky is the
Sacred Bear himself, son of Nurni Torum,
the supreme god of the Khanty, Father of the Skies. The forest giants are powerful spirits,
malevolent toward men, but often stupid.
The White-Neck Mother is the ancient She-Deer. ... Bear worship is known
through virtually the whole of Siberia, from the Komi people west of the Ural Mountains to the Ainu of Sakhalin Island.” (2)
As a witness to the Khanty Bear Feast, the Kiowa Indian novelist N.
Scott Momaday writes: “In the Khanty bear ceremony, one of the principal
participants is a singer. He carries a
stick on which there are a hundred notches.
Each notch represents a song. The
singer sings these hundred songs during the ceremony, which lasts four or five
days. The songs are committed to the
singer’s memory. This is a remarkable
feat of memorization and indicates beyond doubt that the oral tradition of the
Khanty people is as vital as was the oral tradition of the Anglo-Saxons who
recited Beowulf in the ninth century
or of the Navajo singer who sings the Night Chant in the twenty-first
century. Words are the keys, language is
the repository of culture.” (in The Way of Kinship, p. x)

(3)
A Plains Indian “death song,” calling into question the singer’s own
bear totem as guardian power:

Big
Bear you
deceive me

A view of the world, in short, open enough to put questions above
answers as the mark of a truly human life.

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